Mission Impossible: Operation Surma

Disavow any knowledge of this terrible Game Boy Advance title.

The holiday season is the time when game publishers drop huge amounts of games onto the market, flooding shelves with a huge assortment of titles of varying quality. The Game Boy Advance saw its fair share of this gaming glut in November and December, and when several dozen games hit the scene in a short number of days, it's next to impossible to keep up. If a game, released during these months, didn't get reviewed by year's end, it's a good bet that it really wasn't worth picking up. Case in point: Atari's Game Boy Advance version of Mission Impossible: Operation Surma, an absolutely awful action adventure released last year that just can't even compare with some similar 8-bit Game Boy or NES games of several years ago.

So what we have here is a Game Boy Advance version of the moderately successful console design of the same name. Like the PlayStation 2 and Xbox game, the player's in the role of the Tom Cruise "Ethan Hunt" character in a tactical-style action game of gadgetry and stealth. But where gamers have a lot of power and abilities at their fingertips on the console, there's not a whole lot to do in the GBA game other than wander around the area, follow the on-screen directions, and deal with some seriously unfun gameplay.

Where the console versions were produced by Paradigm, the Game Boy Advance edition was given to handheld studio M4. Now, even though this team had produced several Game Boy Color titles of varying success, M4 hasn't really proven itself in the Game Boy Advance arena...and its unfamiliarity with the platform is crystal clear in the final product. The game flat-out looks like a Game Boy Color game, right down to the yucky, 8-bit cutscenes that look like they were produced in some old-school EGA art program. The in-game sprites and backgrounds aren't nearly as bad, but they barely crack the level of what's expected out of the GBA hardware. In fact, this game doesn't look that much better than what Rebellion did in the original Mission Impossible released on the Game Boy Color more than three years ago.

The game's quality doesn't end with the graphics; the design is entirely uninspired and just thrown together. Stealth? Sure, it's here, but the enemies only respond if the player happens to wander into direct line of sight; a little to the left or to the right of the character's peripheral vision and it's as if you don't even exist. Gadgets? Only the basics...mostly revolving around wandering around the area in "disguises" that's nothing more than a basic palette-swap of the Ethan sprite. Weapons? One or two, and they're all powered equally. Hand-to-hand combat? If you call a wonky kung-fu chop to the neck combat, then sure...there are unarmed attacks in Mission Impossible Operation Surma. The GBA game features a cartridge save to keep track of the player's progress throughout the missions, but check this: you can't save manually. The game will pick seemingly arbitrary times to awkwardly pull up the "Save Game" menu as the player wanders around the mission, and these are the only places that players can record progress.

And for a game that's based around the movie, the presentation is nearly non-existent. Yes, we're aware that pretty boy Tom Cruise doesn't let his likeness appear in videogames, but couldn't the designers do something to link this game to the theatrical release, instead of simply "generic bald black dude" talking to "generic black-haired white dude" in cutscenes? Oh, sure, there's the Mission Impossible theme song. And, hoo boy do the developers make sure to put that in there. In fact, it doesn't stop...the background music is a 20 second loop of a hard-guitar version of the MI rift. You'll be thankful the game has a "Music: Off" option.

The Verdict

Anyone with a Game Boy should be familiar with exactly what this is: a low-budget, quickly developed portable videogame produced simply to latch onto the release of a much bigger console production. These type of titles are a dime a dozen in the handheld market, and Atari's rendition of Mission Impossible: Operation Surma is a poor attempt to offer Metal Gear Solid-style gameplay on the GBA, what with its awful graphic style and incredibly repetitive music accommodating some rather uncreative, bland game design.